Aftermath

by Charles Sheffield

  They went on eating and drinking in silence for a while. Art thought that Dana agreed with him, and he was surprised when she at last added, "I believe that Seth is much worse than you think. But he's here, and he may be the only other one of our group who ever shows up. You have to be ready to work with him."

  "Oh, I'll work with him, don't you worry. In our situation we can't afford to get into fights among ourselves. I'll work with the devil if I have to. But if you don't agree that he's ruthless, why are you so negative about Seth?"

  "Part of it's personal. You'll probably claim that it's a woman thing, but I don't like the way he looks at me and talks to me."

  "He comes on to you?"

  "Not in the usual way. If it were just that, I could handle it. Guys have been hitting on me since I was twelve years old. I mean, most guys. I don't mean you. You've never come on to me at all."

  Could that be a hint—at a most improbable time? But Art only said, "Of course not. I'd be afraid to. How does he look at you and talk to you?"

  "Speculatively. Like I'm a piece of flesh. Like, if I could just get you alone, where no one was likely to come along and interrupt . . ." She held the empty measuring cup out to Art. "I don't know what was in this, but I'm talking crazy. Forget what I just said. Pour me another."

  "Catoctin Mountain Park legal limit: one per person."

  "Really?"

  "Yep. Trouble is, no one ever says what it's one of." It wasn't really a joke. He was pleased out of all proportion when she laughed, put her hand on his arm, and said, "I don't need to worry about Seth. I won't be alone, will I? You're here, too. I'll be all right."

  "That's true, ma'am." Art filled the cups again. He tried to do it slowly and carefully, but his hand trembled. Mary hadn't been alone, either. He had been there with her, and what good had that done? She had only wanted to make a video for her own use, she would have given up the camera willingly.

  But he tried not to think too much about Mary. Usually, except alone and late at night, he succeeded.

  "Are you feeling all right?" Dana was staring at him with a worried look on her face.

  "Tired, I guess." Art screwed the cap slowly back on the bottle and offered a cup to Dana. "It's been a long day."

  "It sure has." She took the cup and slid off her stool. "Come on. Bring your bag, and we can talk as much as you like tomorrow. I'll drink this as a nightcap."

  "Where are you going?"

  "To bed." She picked up the lamp. "We don't know when Seth will get back, but I'm not going to sit up waiting."

  "There are still beds here?"

  "A few, in the upstairs rooms. I guess they were too much trouble to haul away and not worth smashing."

  She led the way out of the bar, through the ruin that had once been the hotel restaurant, and up the stairway. The banister had been broken off, but the carpet was intact. Art, climbing painfully to the top floor, heard the rattle of hail or heavy rain on the roof above the landing.

  "Listen to that. I'm glad I'm here, and not out in it."

  "I'm glad you're here, too." She paused at one of the doors. "I'm in the next one along, so you may as well take this room. I checked it out earlier. The water's off, but the toilet will work—once."

  "It will be fresh water in the tank. I don't want to waste it."

  "That's your option. I'm going to use mine in the usual way. I'm not ready to give up completely on civilization. You say you have candles and matches?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you want to light one before I go?"

  "No. It's all right. I'll manage."

  "All right. Good night, then."

  She continued to the next door, entered, and closed it. Art stood hesitating in the dark corridor for a few seconds. Finally he went and knocked on her door. "Dana?"

  "What?"

  "Do you have a gun?"

  The door opened. She raised the lamp and stared at him. "I do not. I never learned how to use one. I'd be more danger to myself than anyone else."

  "Well, I have one. Knock on the wall or come into my room if there's any trouble."

  "I don't think there will be. But thanks." She closed the door again. Art headed into his own room, lit a candle, and stared around him. A bed with a mattress, but no pillow, sheets, or blankets.

  He had real trouble sleeping without a pillow. If he took off his thick sweater, he could fold it up and put it under his head. But it was going to be a cold night, he'd need all the warm clothing he could get.

  So he'd manage without a pillow. What did he expect, room service?

  Art placed his gun carefully down by the side of the bed, where he could reach it in one movement. He blew out the candle, stretched himself on the bed, and pillowed his head on his hands. He was still trying to make himself comfortable when he heard a knock on the door.

  "Yes?"

  "Are you decent? I'm coming in." Dana entered. She was in a thin white slip, and with the oil lamp held high she was a vision from another century. She carried a pillow under her arm, which she held out to Art. "Here. I found three of these in the back of the closet."

  "Thanks." Art admired her dancer's legs and curved hips, wondered at the way she was dressed, and said, "Pillows. That's just what I was wishing I had. Are you going to sleep in that outfit? You'll freeze."

  "I brought flannel pajamas and a few sweaters."

  "Good."

  She stood for a moment as though waiting for him to do or say something more. At last she nodded and said, "Good night, then."

  She left. Art heard her door close, and the click as she locked it—something he hadn't bothered to do to his. He got up again, made his way to the door, and turned the lock. As he fumbled his way back to the bed he realized what all this reminded him of: one of the old farces, set in a hotel or a country house, knocking on bedroom doors, full of confusion and mistaken identities.

  Except that he, Dana, and Seth Parsigian—if he returned—were the only people staying at the Treasure Inn. There would be no middle-of-the-night shenanigans. It was time to go to sleep, if he was to be good for anything in the morning.

  He settled into bed again, much more comfortable with the pillow against his cheek. And he wondered. Was he the world's most stupid man? Dana had been wearing pants when he arrived at the Treasure Inn. You don't wear a slip underneath pants. And you don't put flannel pajamas and multiple sweaters on over a thin slip. Which meant she must have put the slip on in the past few minutes, before she came into his room, and she would take it off again before she went to bed.

  Or was there a completely different explanation, which he was just too tired to see? Art gazed at the invisible ceiling, tried to think, and at once drifted off.

  As always in the past ten years, he was a light sleeper. Sometime in the middle of the night he came awake, abruptly and uneasily. While he stared up into total darkness, the sound came again. It was the scream of something or someone in terrible pain.

  Should he go and make sure that Dana was all right? But the sound was far away, nowhere inside the hotel. He could not even place a direction. Without a watch he had little idea of the time.

  He lay and listened. The scream did not come again. The drum of rain on the roof had ended, and now the night was totally and unnaturally silent.

  At last, waiting for a dawn that never seemed to arrive, he fell into the unsatisfying half sleep of present nightmares and old, happier memories.

  7

  Art woke to the faint sound of voices. It felt early, but when he opened his eyes the ceiling and walls of the room were strangely bright. He rolled out of bed, tested his arthritic knee gingerly before putting his weight on it, and limped over to the window.

  Snow. Thick, large-flaked snow, falling steadily and already deep on the ground. No wonder everything was so bright.

  What was the date? Almost the end of March. It was unusual in this area to have snow so late in the year, but not unheard of. Ten years ago snow had fallen in April. But not snow like this. No
t a dense whiteout that reduced visibility to forty or fifty yards, covering plants that had been seduced by early warmth to a late spring stage of growth. If this year's harvest had been a question mark before, it was now a guaranteed disaster.

  Art went across to the toilet and used it, but he did not flush it. He closed the lid and opened the tank, leaned over, and sniffed. It smelled fresh. He rubbed cold water on his face, dried himself using the sleeve of his sweater, and closed the tank.

  He could no longer hear the voices. Still in his stockinged feet, he picked up his waterproof bag, opened the door, and headed downstairs. The person he would most like to have seen was Morgan Davis. Morgan was only in his early forties but he had lost all his hair before Art met him, either naturally or as a by-product of some dubious treatment preceding the telomod therapy. His smooth, well-shaped skull and even features combined with a thoughtful way of speaking and an urbane manner to suggest a distinguished Chinese elder. Everyone in the treatment group recognized his authority. If Morgan were here, Art would certainly be glad to hand over his own role in major decision making.

  No such luck. Morgan was far-off in Arizona. The only people in the dining room were Dana—fresh-faced and lively, her light brown hair pulled back from her face—and Seth Parsigian.

  At every previous meeting of the treatment group— which Parsigian insisted on calling the Lazarus Club— Seth had been groomed and coiffured and impeccably outfitted in expensive business suits. Now, dressed in dark gray pants and a slick black overcoat three sizes too big, he squatted over a tiny gas stove. His black hair had been trimmed to an uneven stubble, marked and furrowed by the scars of past surgery, and now it was wet with flakes of melting snow. Somehow, amid all the rain of the past weeks, Seth had acquired a heavy tan. He glanced up at Art with alert, dark brown eyes and grinned.

  "Hey there, big boy. Slept well, eh? You must have a real clear conscience."

  The old incongruity, Middle Eastern looks and polished manner combined with a West Virginia good-old-boy accent, had vanished. Art felt that he was seeing Seth clearly for the first time. Here was the real man, poised, primitive, and confident, crouched over a pan of snow melt.

  "No one else made it?" Art spoke to Dana, but it was Seth who answered.

  "Anybody with any sense will be holed up someplace, 'til it's over. It's real rough out there."

  "The weather?" Art recalled the agonized scream in the night.

  "That, too." Seth jiggled the pan impatiently. "Come on, you. Boil."

  "You brought the stove with you?" Art put down his bag, opened it, and felt around inside.

  "Let's just say, I came across it. I knew from bein' here yesterday there was plenty of propane, a couple of five-hundred-gallon tanks of it down in the basement. Too heavy to haul out, I guess, without equipment."

  Art, with a mixture of satisfaction and regret, pulled the jar of coffee crystals from his bag and handed it to Dana. Seth saw it, and his eyes gleamed.

  "Now we're smokin'. Where'd you scrounge that, boy? I've not smelled coffee for a week."

  "Let's just say, I came across it. Here's sugar, too." Art felt an odd reluctance to mention to Seth his hideaway up on Catoctin Mountain. Yet he knew he would have no hesitation in giving details of the place to Dana, or even in taking her there. "What were you going to do with the hot water?"

  "Boil rice. I got me a fifty-pound bag. White rice, I'm afraid." Teeth gleamed in the dark face. "Not nutritionally balanced, you know. Maybe we'll all get sick."

  "Sick again," Dana said. She put the jar of coffee crystals down on the floor, straightened up, and began to pace around the ruins of the dining room. "Not if I have anything to do with it. I've been too close to death once. I don't care what you two do, but I'm heading for the Institute. Snow or no snow, I have to find out what our chances are."

  Seth stared up at her from where he squatted. "Hey, girl, easy. There's a whole lotta day left yet."

  Art stood up and went over to Dana. "Of course we're going to the Institute," he said gently. "We didn't come all this way not to go. But you need to travel on a full stomach. First you have something to eat and drink."

  "I'm not hungry."

  "I believe you. Before I entered the telomod program, my old doctors tried multiple drug antimetabolite chemotherapy. Did they do the same to you?"

  "Sure they did. It didn't work, though—nothing worked. I tried the telomod as a last resort."

  "Same with all of us. Right, Seth?"

  "Too damn right."

  "So, Dana, do you remember what the chemo did to you?"

  "Of course I remember. I'll never forget. It didn't help with the cancer, but it stripped the lining of my mouth and throat and esophagus. They were raw. I couldn't swallow."

  "You couldn't eat. So what did you do?"

  "You know what I did. The same as you did, the same as we all did. I ate. I cried with every swallow. It took me two hours to force down a milk shake. But I ate. I knew I'd die if I didn't."

  She walked back to where Seth was still sitting patiently by the stove. He had made a pan of coffee, and another pan was heating more water. "Here. You'll need this with the rice." She handed over a blue container of salt. "You're right, Art, of course you are. But we're so close. The Institute is less than a mile away. I thought of going there last night, but it was dark by the time I arrived and it was raining hard."

  "Raining, then snowing," Seth said.

  Art sat down on the floor opposite Seth, stretching his stiff leg out in front of him. "You went there, didn't you?"

  Dark eyes gleamed. "Now why'd you think a thing like that?"

  "If you hadn't, you'd have an itch inside worse than ours. You'd be keener than Dana to get out of here and over there."

  "That easy to read, am I? Well, maybe I'll surprise you yet." Seth dumped a measuring cup of rice into boiling water and threw a pinch of salt in after it. "But you're quite right. I went over to the Institute late last night."

  Art sipped sweetened black coffee. He felt his whole body beginning to wake up. "What did you find?"

  "Nothing worth mentionin'—or I'd have mentioned it already. The Institute was the way it ought to be at night. Locked. I tried the doors. Dead bolts. I tried the bells, and they didn't work. No surprise, the automatic guards and security systems aren't functioning. I didn't try shouting, and I won't try shouting today. Were you thinkin' of shouting?"

  Art shook his head. "No way."

  "So why not?"

  "Just listen. It's completely quiet outside. We're strangers here, but it shouldn't be this quiet without a good reason. Where are the people, and what are they doing?"

  Seth raised himself from his crouched position, walking about the room to stretch his legs and leaving Art and Dana to make sure that the cooking rice did not boil over. "Where are the people, eh? You been livin' in the city the past week and a half?"

  "No. Far from it." Again, Art felt a reluctance to give details to Seth.

  "Well, if you had you'd be able to take a good shot at answerin' your own question. Maybe you can anyway."

  Art said nothing.

  Seth was over by a window, staring out at snow that fell as heavily as ever. After a moment he went on, "I'm in the shipping business—or I guess I should say I used to be. 'Til eleven days ago Supernova Alpha was givin' us wild weather, but nothin' that the system couldn't handle. Shipments from South America and South Africa were spotty an' gettin' worse, but the freight monorails were bringing supplies in regular from anywhere on this continent. Some folk were even sayin' it was no bad thing if food stockpiles were comin' down. The recom ag protocols can grow strawberries on a salt heap, so they say, and we've had gluts an' more and more long-term storage for the past decade. Be nice to pull 'em down a bit.

  "Then, twelve days ago, March 14, Day of Infamy 'cept we had nobody to blame an' flame, Nature stopped playing around an' crapped all over us.

  "When the gamma burst hit an' all the microchips went belly-up"—it
was Art's first confirmation that what he had told Ed O'Donnell and Joe Vanetti was correct—"I knew we were in trouble, but I don't think anybody had any idea how much. I sure didn't. I mean, power went out, but we've had outages before. The Antifed blowout in '16 shut the whole damn grid down for eight days, how could anything be worse than that? Next day, though, I couldn't get a telcom working, or a van, or a credit machine. There were a dozen big holes around the city, where heavy lifters just dropped out of the sky. Nobody knew what the government was doing—if it still existed. I chose my place, stockpiled all I could, and went to ground. I might be there still, if Dana hadn't called. Though I have to say, I was gettin' awful itchy to find out what was happenin' at the Institute." Seth pulled back his sleeve to reveal three spots of light blue. "There's the reminder, my treatment session comin' up in six weeks—not that I need reminding, any more than you do. That's why we're here. It's why we're even alive, when logically we ought to be dead. Lazarus Club members might not like each other much"—Seth winked at Art, as though he knew more than he was saying—"but we can rely on each other for one thing: a strong interest in living.

  "But what about the rest of the people? I don't mean the whole continent. I don't give a damn about that. I mean this city and the area around it. There's fifty million people here—no, forget that. Let's say, twelve days ago there were fifty million. It's been twelve days now without power. Twelve days since water came out of the faucets, twelve days since food supplies came in from outside, twelve days since a news broadcast system existed, twelve days since money or government could do anything for you."

  "It takes longer than twelve days—" Dana began. But she stopped, and turned her head back down to the little stove.

  "Longer than that, for people to die of starvation?" Seth walked to where Art had snagged a few grains of rice with his knife and was tasting them to see if they were cooked. "Yeah. It does. But it only took three or four days for some people to figure out that no one had any idea how long the problem would go on—we still have no idea, least, I don't. An' I live—lived—half a mile from the White House. Wouldn't you think it ought to be safe there, if anywhere could be? But by the sixth day I decided to get out. Too many corpses for my taste. An' I could hear gunfire around the clock. Most guns have smart circuits for automatic aiming and target motion compensation, so they won't work anymore. My guess was, for every shot I heard there must have been fifty people stickin' each other with knives or bangin' away with clubs and axes."